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Engineers in the final stages of assembling NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va., January 2012. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Orbital
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The carrier plane that will give NuSTAR and its rocket a lift to their airborne launch site is seen here at sunrise on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCB
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This stunning false-color picture shows off the many sides of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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An artist's concept of the NuSTAR observatory. Its nested mirrors reside at the end of at 33-foot (10-meter) mast, allowing them to focus X-rays onto detectors at the other end.

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An artist's animation showing the deployment of NuSTAR's lengthy mast, an event expected to take place about one week after launch.

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The bottom image simulates how NuSTAR will see the center of our Milky Way galaxy compared to views from ESA's Integral, shown at top. NuSTAR will have much improved sensitivity and resolution over space telescopes operating at similar high-energy X-ray bands. This will allow the observatory to get more detailed information on black holes and other exotic objects. The Integral mission was designed to study the high-energy sky with both X-rays and ever higher-energy gamma rays.